[derefr]

The point of RSS is that it works just as well when your site is just a static site that you hand-edit the HTML of and push to some cheapo VPS using FTP. (Or, more realistically for the HN crowd, when you use a static-site generator where your CI pushes the result to an S3-API-compatible object-storage-bucket fronted with an edge cache like CloudFlare.)

In such cases, there is no backend to do any of what you're describing. But it's still a blog.

Note that this backend-less approach is actually quite common with blogs; it's one large reason that client-JS-driven embedded commenting systems like Discourse are popular with blogs.